Can you "improve" a MONO sample ?

[gilesgoat]

So .. this is the simple story .. you have "sound effects" like "explosions" "gazoinks" "layz0rs" .. most of which are synthesized ( clearly we are not going to make something explode for real and record it ).

So it's a MONO sample .. that when played stereo gets "duplicated" in the L-R channels.

"Fine" but "is anything better that could be done" ?

Also at that point "what happens to the sound" ? Does it has "a fixed position in space" ? How does it really "feel" ?

Is anything "simple" you could do to a mono sample to "enrich a bit the experience" ?

What happens if you add a delay to one of the channels ? Does that spatially move the sound ?

And it's that a delay that goes "on the full channel" OR should be "different/selective of frequencies" ?

Intriguing is it ?

[Chontler]

Oh yeah. Guitars are mono. A lot of synths are too. The stereo comes from added stereo effects, usually reverb and delay.

[WiteWulf]

An old fashioned trick for making a mono source sound more "interesting" in stereo is to use a stereo multi band EQ, and min/max each alternating band on the left channel, but reverse it on the right channel. It's more useful for "noisy" sound sources such as distorted guitars or synths with a white noise component, but can work well with other stuff. Just give it a try.

Here's a visual example:

[WiteWulf]

There's a lot more you can do (principally with delays) covered here:
https://www.creativefieldrecording.com/ ... nd-theory/

[Dio]

Get playing with Audacity's built-in effects. Phaser, wah, reverb, delay are all good to play with. Crazy narrow and wideband eqs, especially if you can sweep them over time.

[Little stoned kiwi]

Give each sound a location, direction, and speed, then implement some sort of Doppler effect?

[skab]

And if we're not talking about "ready" sounds but ones you synthesize yourself somehow, just create this sound once, tweak the parameters a bit to make it a little bit different, then use that sound for the other channel.

That's basically what doubling guitars and vocals does.

I'm a big fan of the old SID tunes (and the new ones even more!), and putting the 6581 version on one, the 8580 version on the other channel (the quite different revisions of the SID chip) sometimes makes for a surprisingly good stereo image!